The Intel IVPU accelerator driver used on Linux for the neural processing unit (NPU) on Core Ultra SoCs saw a patch posted for allowing the NPU clock frequency to be limited in the name of power and thermal management.

Somewhat surprisingly with how NPUs have been talked up as being a tiny part of the die and power efficient for AI, a patch under review for the Linux kernel's IVPU driver will allow limiting the NPU frequency for power and thermal management reasons.

The Intel-contributed patch for the IVPU driver will

Merged back in Linux 6.19 was the ASUS Armoury driver to enhance support for the ROG Ally gaming handhelds and modern ASUS laptops . The ASUS Armoury driver enables various laptop features to be toggled under Linux and since its introduction it has continued expanding support for more ASUS devices . Ahead of Linux 7.0 coming out on Sunday, a few more devices are now supported by this upstream driver.

Sent out and merged today were the latest x86 platform driver fixes for Linux 7.0 stable this weekend,

RISC-V processor IP purveyor SiFive just announced they have raised $400 million USD in an over-subscribed Series G financing round. This latest funding is so they can further focus on delivering high performance RISC-V designs for the data center.

SiFive is "doubling down" on the data center and is using the $400M in additional funding to accelerate their development of next-gen data center solutions. They are working on new high performance RISC-V CPU core designs as well as

In addition to RISC-V discontinuing its eXecute In Place "XIP" kernel support for Linux 7.1, there is an optimized strnlen() function coming for Linux 7.1 on RISC-V as well as some other optimized functions.

Feng Jiang with KylinOS wrote a hand-optimized strnlen() implementation for RISC-V with both a generic code path and Zbb-powered version. The strnlen() function used throughout the kernel for safely determining the length of a string is seeing a massive speed-

Natalie Vock of Valve's Linux graphics driver team primarily working on the RADV Vulkan driver has come up with a new interesting creation: patches to the Linux kernel and KDE for sharply improving the gaming experience for those running systems with limited amounts of video memory. Such as for graphics cards with just 8GB of dedicated vRAM, the patches now available -- initially on CachyOS for a nice out-of-the-box experience -- provide a noticeably better Linux gaming experience.

Natalie Vock's Linux kernel patches

Beyond the capabilities of just the Vulkan Video API, the FFmpeg multimedia library has made interesting Vulkan-accelerated adaptations using compute shaders. With Vulkan compute they've implemented Apple ProRes video acceleration , FFV1 decode , and other features. The newest Vulkan feature now in place for FFmpeg is 360 degree video conversion.

FFmpeg developer Lynne "Cyanreg" implemented a 360 degree video conversion implementation powered by Vulkan compute for more efficient handling than just CPU-based conversion. Currently this new lavfi/v36

The open-source Lemonade local AI server that enables using Ryzen AI NPUs on Linux for LLM usage as well as AMD Radeon GPU support and common x86_64 CPU support (in addition to Microsoft Windows support) is now becoming easier to embed within other apps for AI usage.

Lemonade continues advancing rapidly with its local AI server capabilities for supporting CPUs / GPUs / NPUs, primarily from AMD with their engineers being heavily involved in its development. Just days after the Lemonade 10.1 release is now

The newest Vulkan API extension now wired up for Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is VK_EXT_primitive_restart_index that was introduced last week.

VK_EXT_primitive_restart_index allows for setting a custom primitive restart index and designed to help support OpenGL emulation atop the Vulkan API. VK_EXT_primitive_restart_index was developed by Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics team. Blumenkrantz notably is one of the lead developers of Mesa's Zink driver for

Miracle-WM as the Wayland compositor / window manager built atop Canonical's Mir project is out with a big new feature release. This "hackable" and i3/Sway-inspired Wayland compositor has landed a WebAssembly-based plug-in system for opening up new possibilities as well as a new Rust API with this week's v0.9 release.

Miracle-WM 0.9 introduces a WebAssembly-based plug-in system that can configure window management, animations, configurations, and more.